127 enriches – as in the layering of two horse bodies exceeding the volume of the vitrine for No life lost II (2015), for which a superficial glance is not enough to understand whether it is Eros or Thanatos. Conceptual layering, on the other hand, sinks into a continuum of contemporary images, Greek myths, Christian martyrs and the work of European and Flemish masters such as Cranach, Caravaggio, Giordano, van der Weyden and Zurbarán. Icons layered on icons to give birth to bodies without connotations, belonging to no time and no place, which it is more immediate to activate a mechanism of projection on. «One of the things I enjoy most is bringing together things so that objects with different histories converge, producing an added dimension,» she said in 2021. I then ask her what lies in that added dimension: «I think the added dimension for me quite simply lies in the act of connecting, of subscribing as an artist to a bigger story, the story of humanity, which is as much about diversity and change, as it is about self-repeating dynamics». I am thinking back to the very first document I consulted to prepare myself for this conversation: a PowerPoint edited by her in 2017, for a lecture on the theme of passions commissioned by LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura, where flashes of her works flowed at schizoid speed, together with frames of Pasolini's films and details of Cranach's artworks, from Christ as the Man of Sorrows (Thanatos) to Emilia in Theorem (Eros), both with their mouths ajar, in their hunger for love. Icons made alive in their relationality, proximity and heterogeneity, in the lesson of respect for plurality, strengthened by a further unsettling clash: the choice of the accompanying track, Lou Reed's Pumping Blood, deliriously and obsessively repeating Will you have mercy? while her Pietas were appearing. And here I was expecting, I dunno, Monteverdi. «Sometimes I think perhaps it’s time to make a new one,» she confesses to me, «many years later, many images later. The pace and nature of the images I am confronted with now, through different channels, have changed dramatically; they have become increasingly brutal, and impossible to escape». Until recently, a large wall in her studio was thick with photographs taken from the most heterogeneous sources, evidence of his prismatic imagination. But she tells me that nowadays she can no longer keep up with that avalanche of images and she doesn’t pin them on her wall anymore, but only because «they are burnt on my retina, and they come to me all the time when I work. The image has this power. The image is a much more physical experience». «Still, I managed to get about twenty photographs, and with bits of chewed bread I pasted them on the back of the cardboard sheet of regulations that hangs on the wall. Some are pinned up with bits of brass wire which the foreman brings me and on which I have to string colored glass beads. Using the same beads with which the prisoners next door make funeral wreaths, I have made star-shaped frames for the most purely criminals. In the evening, as you open your window to the street, I turn the back of the regulation sheet towards me. Smiles and sneers, alike inexorable, enter me by all the holes I offer. They watch over my little routines». - Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers, 1943 The strategy of layering, her act of connecting as an artist to the story of humanity as she says, is the sworn and non-violent enemy of that sub-species of cheap purism (cf. totalitarianism) exclusive prerogative of those who do not know at all what to do with respect. De Bruyckere tells me this by going back in her mind to Istanbul, which she tells me she remembers «as one of the most memorable experiences of my career as an artist. All the more painful it was to read, in July 2021, that the Turkish government
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